Henry Lee Lucas
"Killing someone is just like walking outdoors. If I wanted a victim, I'd go and get one." Henry Lee Lucas, aka "The Confession Killer", was a serial killer who claimed responsibility for over 600 murders. Background "I hated all my life. I hated everybody. When I first grew up and can remember, I was dressed as a girl by my mother. And I stayed that way for two or three years. And after that I was treated like what I call the dog of the family. I was beaten. I was made to do things that no human bein' would want to do." Henry Lee Lucas was born in Blacksburg, Virginia in 1936. His father, Anderson "No Legs" Lucas, had lost his legs in a workplace accident by a railroad and was an alcoholic. He also introduced Henry to alcohol at a young age. Henry's mother, Viola Dixon Lucas (née Waugh) was a prostitute as well as an alcoholic and ruled the household, a one-room log cabin. Henry was the youngest of their nine children and often suffered Viola's rage, as would his father and brother. Henry was once beaten by her so hard with a wooden plank that he spent three days in a coma. She would also make him watch her have sex with her lover, "Uncle Bernie", and a number of strange men and dress him up in girls' clothing. She also shot and killed a mule Henry was given by an uncle and abused him for accepting a teddy bear at school. When Lucas was ten years old, he suffered an accidental injury to his left eye during a fight with his brother. The injury was ignored by Viola for days until it was infected so badly that the eye had to be removed and replaced with a glass eye. By that age, Henry was already almost an alcoholic. His older half-brother and Uncle Bernie had also introduced him to bestiality (sex with animals) and animal torture. In 1949, Anderson Lucas passed away from hypothermia after passing out drunk in a blizzard. Aged 14, by his own less-than-reliable account, Henry had his first human sexual experience, raping and strangling an unknown girl. In June 1954, he was sentenced to six years' incarceration for a dozen counts of burglary and was released on September 2, 1959, after two failed escape attempts. He moved to his sister's place in Tecumseh, Michigan, but Viola soon caught up with him. When she wanted him to come back to take care of her, they got into an argument that resulted in her death when he stabbed her in the neck, causing her to have a fatal heart attack. Though he claimed self-defense, he was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 20-40 years in prison. Killings and Incarceration After being released due to prison overcrowding in June 1970 after serving only ten years of his sentence, Lucas was sentenced to another three and a half years in prison for trying to kidnap two young girls. After being released, he went to Pennsylvania and got married in 1975, but left his wife, Betty Crawford, when she accused him of molesting her two daughters. At this point, he started drifting around the American South, supporting himself through various odd jobs and, by his own account, began what became a long series of murders, traveling along highways and raping and murdering women. In 1976, he met Ottis Toole (see section below), a fellow sexual deviant from Jacksonville, Florida, at a soup kitchen in Florida and the two struck up a friendship. Lucas moved into Ottis' home in Jacksonville, where he fell in love with his 10 year old niece, Frieda "Becky" Powell. From 1979 to 1981, Lucas and Toole worked together at a roofing company (some sources claim they were in a homosexual relationship). Lucas later claimed to have committed hundreds of murders during that time, 108 of which were committed together with Toole, sometimes on the orders of a satanic, cannibalistic cult called "The Hands of Death". He also claimed that Toole's preferred M.O. in these killings was to crucify his victims, then barbecue and eat them. Lucas claimed that he never took part in those acts himself because he didn't like barbecue sauce. Shortly after they and Becky moved to Stoneburg, Texas, Becky, who had become smitten and sexually active with Lucas, had begun feeling homesick. He agreed to move to Florida with her and they ran away together. Ottis was left behind and, he later claimed, became so enraged that he spent a little over a year killing a total of nine people in six different states. Lucas got a job working for the elderly Kate Rich in Texas, living together with Becky. The two were later kicked out by her neighbors when it was found that he had been cashing checks written in her name. They found a brief home at the House of Prayer, a Pentecostal commune in the area. The head of the group, Ruben Moore, gave Lucas and Becky, who claimed to be a married couple, a shack to live in and hired Lucas as a roofer. On August 24, 1982, he drove with her to a field in Denton, Texas and killed her, dismembered her body and scattered the pieces in a nearby field. Three weeks later, on September 16, he convinced Kate Rich to join him in a search for Becky, killing her in Ringgold, Texas on a camping ground and stuffing the body into a drainage pipe. After drifting for a month, he returned to the House of Prayer, where he spent his last days as a free man. Upon learning that he was a suspect in Rich's disappearance, he returned to the body, took it to the House of Prayer and incinerated it in a stove. He took a polygraph test and passed it. On June 11 the following year, Lucas was arrested for illegal firearm possession. He was eventually charged with Rich's and Becky's murders, but later claimed he had confessed to them in order to escape the harsh treatment he endured from the Texas Rangers. Bone fragments presumed to be Rich's were found in a stove at the House of Prayer and skeletal remains of the same sex and approximate age as Becky were found in the field where Lucas claimed to have killed her, though the coroner wouldn't positively identify them as who they were claimed to be. After four days in jail, Lucas pleaded guilty to the two murders in court and also confessed to over a hundred additional murders of women. Over the following year and a half, he kept pouring out confessions to hundreds of murders. A "Lucas Task Force", led by the Texas Rangers, was formed to examine the validity of his claims. In November, he was transferred to Williamson County, Texas, where he confessed to 213 unsolved murders. Over time, Lucas' confessions just kept on coming. Authorities flew him across states, where he was allowed stays in motels and served steaks and milkshakes. Among the murders he confessed to was the death of a man which had previously been deemed a suicide. Eventually, a detective from Dallas, Texas, who felt uncertain as to whether Lucas' claims were true, made up some crimes to see if Lucas would confess to them as well, which he did. Another detective, Linda Erwin from Dallas, did the same thing with the same results. Lucas' claims soon became increasingly unlikely; he named "The Hands of Death", he claimed to have supplied the poison used in the mass suicide of the Peoples Temple in Jonestown, he claimed to have committed additional murders in Japan and Spain even though he had never left the country and also to have killed Jimmy Hoffa. The media soon claimed that the whole Lucas affair was a hoax by law enforcement to clear up some unsolved crimes. The Texas Attorney General's office ordered a study comparing a reliable timeline of Lucas' whereabouts to the murders he confessed to. In most cases, his claims were found to have been contradictory. In the end, he was found guilty of 11 murders and was also sentenced to death for the 1979 murder of an unidentified woman in Texas known only as "Orange Socks", after the only piece of clothing the body wore when it was found. This, however, was one murder he couldn't have committed, as he was working as a roofer in Florida at the time. He soon began recanting his many confessions, admitting only to having killed his mother, Becky Powell and Kate Rich, though he once flatly stated that he "was not a serial killer". In 1998, six days before his execution, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the then-Governor of Texas, George W. Bush. On March 13, 2001, Lucas died in prison from a heart attack. Ottis Toole Ottis Elwood Toole was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1947 and came from a background similar to that of Lucas. His mother was an abusive religious fanatic. He claimed that he had been sexually abused by his own family and that his grandmother had been a Satanist. He had an estimated IQ of only 75 and was also diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. He frequently ran away and was a serial arsonist at a young age, being a pyromaniac. He knew he was gay at the age of 10 and often supported himself through prostitution. It is uncertain how he got around between 1966 and 1973, but it's believed he made a living through panhandling and prostitution. As he hitchhiked around the American South, he was a prime murder suspect on different occasions, but was never arrested. After Lucas left with Becky Powell, Ottis allegedly began his career as a serial killer. On January 12, 1982, he locked in a man named George Sonnenberg in his house and set the building on fire, killing him. After being arrested in April, 1984, he confessed to more murders and was convicted of three, including the death of Sonnenberg. One murder for which he was convicted was the shooting of Ada Johnson, 19, in Florida. One murder he claimed responsibility for was an attack on a massage parlor during which two women, one of which died, were stabbed and set on fire. Because another man had been convicted of the murder, the prosecutors didn't accept his claim and Toole withdrew his confession: "Okay, if you say I didn't kill her, maybe I didn't." Among his alleged victims was 6-year-old Adam Walsh, who was asphyxiated to death in Hollywood, Florida in 1981. Only the head of the body was recovered. Though Toole, according to his niece, claimed responsibility for the murder on his deathbed in 1996, he was never tried for it. Jeffrey Dahmer, who was living in Miami Beach at the time, also became a suspect. In 2008, Toole was officially named the killer by Florida police, though his confession has been met with some skepticism since Toole and Lucas claimed responsibility for so many other murders. Alleged/Possible Victims *c. 1961: **Unnamed travelling salesman **Unnamed woman *April 18, 1974, Lincoln, Nebraska: Patricia Webb, 24 *September 19, 1974, Colorado Springs, Colorado: **Yun Lee **Sun Ok Cousin *October 10, 1974: Ellen Holman, 31 *February 6, 1980, Pensacola, Florida: David Schallart, 19 *July 27, 1981, Hollywood, Florida: Adam Walsh, 6 *January 12, 1982: George Sonnenberg, 64 *February, 1983, Fort Walton Beach, Florida: Ada Johnson, 19 Modus Operandi Lucas killed his mother by stabbing her in the neck, which caused her to have a heart attack. Becky Powell and Kate Rich were also killed with a knife, after which Lucas engaged in necrophilia with their corpses and disposed of them outdoors. Powell was also dismembered and decapitated. Kate Rich, on the other hand, was stuffed into a drainage pipe whole and burnt a month later. Lucas, by his own account, would then return to the body to engage in necrophilia with it while it was in the pipe. Known Victims Note: Though Lucas claimed to have committed over 600 murders, there are only three murders that can be positively attributed to him; there are, however, some who believe he committed at least 100 murders. *January 11, 1960, Tecumseh, Michigan: Viola Dixon Lucas, 74 *August 24, 1982, Denton, Texas: Becky Powell, 15 *September 16, 1982, Ringgold, Texas: Kate Rich, 82 Notes *There is a serial killer named Bobbie Joe Long, also known as The Classified Ad Rapist, who killed at least 10 women and raped at least 50 in Florida. He is currently on death row and is, according to TruTV, a distant cousin of Henry Lee Lucas. *A loose adaptation of Henry Lee Lucas' life﻿ with Toole and Powell, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, was made in 1986. It portrays him as an unstable sociopath who enjoys killing people at random, not unlike the way Lucas described himself while he was confessing to murders. Lucas was portrayed by Michael Rooker, who later played a sheriff in the Criminal Minds episode House on Fire. On Criminal Minds Henry Lee Lucas has to date only been mentioned once on Criminal Minds, in the pilot episode Extreme Aggressor. In the end of the episode, Hotch discussing names for his then unborn son and is troubled by the fact that he knows of a killer with the same first name. When Hotch mentions "Henry", Gideon completes it "Lee Lucas". Also, he seems to have inspired some of the background of serial killer Adam Jackson, whose abusive father also made him wear girls' clothing. Sources *Wikipedia's article about Lucas *﻿Wikipedia's article about Ottis Toole *TruTV's articles about Lucas *''Evil Beyond Belief'' (2009) *''The Killer Book of Serial Killers'' (2009) *Wikipedia's article about Adam Walsh's murder *Lucas' IMDb biography *Carpenoctem's article about Ottis Toole Category:Real People Category:Real Life Killers Category:Real Serial Killers